My suggestion is to adopt a guideline for math pages (particularly the more advanced ones) that they should include a specific pointer to the more elementary topics that need to be mastered in order to understand the more advanced page. The pointer should consist not merely in a mention of a page imbedded in a clause in a long sentence, but a specific mention that the linked page is more accessible. Here is an example. Riemannian manifolds and their curvature cannot even begin to be approached until the student has mastered the theorema egregium of Gauss and the idea that Gaussian curvature is an intrinsic invariant. Pages such as Riemannian manifold should make it clear that the reader has to understand surfaces first. A similar example: I believe the reason the contributor who expressed himself above cannot make any headway in exterior algebra is because the wedge product appears there in a completely "ex nihilo" fashion. By the time the article gets around to construct the exterior algebra in terms of the tensor algebra (!), we have already lost all beginners. The page exterior algebra is a great page, but it could be made more accessible to someone with basic background in linear algebra, but not much more. I tried to link it to more elementary pages in the spirit of my suggested guideline above, but encountered reverts on the grounds of being "unencyclopedic". We should adopt a guideline making it encyclopedic to try to help beginners. Tkuvho ( talk) 22:09, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
"The idea" is that a beginner who looks at, say, riemannian manifold, should not walk away baffled, intimidated, and non-plussed, having learned nothing. If we offer him some leads to lower-level articles, he will either look at those and learn something, or else say, OK, to understand Riemannian manifolds I need first to know what Gaussian curvature is. This is far less discouraging than walking away completely baffled, which seems to have been the experience of some of the beginners who expressed themselves above. Every college course has a list of prerequisites in the course catalog. I am not sure why some mild approximation in wiki should be viewed as such anathema. And I don't think this is "condescending" toward the beginner (see comment below), on the contrary, endless blather about "non-encyclopedic" is condescending. Tkuvho ( talk) 14:00, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
I think it is generally a bad idea to start of an article by saying: "you should know this, this, and that before attempting to read this." (Or any friendlier message with the same content.) It feels really condescending to me. Moreover, it encourages laziness on part of the editors, by just allowing them to put up some prerequisites and not push to obtain the uttermost accessibility that is possible for the subject. In particular, it encourages starting articles at a high entry level, instead of steadily increasing the difficulty level as the article proceeds. Another thing to keep in mind, is that there can exist vastly different roads to understanding a mathematical subject. A pattern I sometimes see in the thinking about accessibility of math pages on this project, is that it tends to focus on the path that a typical mathematics student would take in learning about the subject. This is not surprising since it is the path that many of contributors here followed/are following, but many users will actually have a different background, which often misses some of the mathematical foundations that a mathematics student would have, but might on the other hand might include a lot of hands experience of using similar structures. For example, students of theoretical physics will learn about Riemannian manifolds in a GR class without any solid knowledge Gaussian curvature or the theory of surfaces (that a mathematics student would have.) Similarly, when (even if) physics and engineering learn what a tensor of a vector bundle is, they usually have been working with examples of these structures for years. I think that a similar effect to providing a list of prerequisites, (without the possible condescending connotation) can be achieved by detailing in the lead what types of things a concept is generalizing and/or naming a few well-known (to people that do not already know about the subject) concrete examples. This typically are things that a reader should know about to understand the article. A reader that has never heard about any of these things, will generally get the clue that he has encountered an article for which he doesn't even properly understand the basic context. Although hopefully he will have a much better idea of the context then before. TimothyRias ( talk) 13:29, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
Here are some suggestions for the lead. I've itemized them for easier discussion.
-- Sławomir Biały ( talk) 23:40, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
1) Should this discussion be moved to another location? Maybe the talk page of WP:MOSMATH, since I think it is a good idea to record the result of this discussion somewhere, for example as a section of WP:MOSMATH. 2) I generally agree with the points above. Something that could be add is that, if use of jargon is unavoidable, it is generally a good idea to avoid using more than one new piece jargon in a sentence. This way it is possible for readers with a vague acquaintance of the subject, but who are fuzzy on the jargon to get some idea of the meaning of the jargon from the context. T R 08:59, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
Perturbation problem beyond all orders could use some work. Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:54, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
I know, I'm beating this horse over again going over the archives but there few issues and common themes that seem to repeat themselves. WP:NOTTEXTBOOK is often referenced (like in the FAQ above and essay reference) as the excuse for the difficulty of what it's hard to learn anything from WP:Math pages. I do not believe this fair that it's intended purpose. That was meant to leading questions followed by systematic problem solutions as examples. In that same section it states:
Also in right below that in that same section:
This is the problem with the current state of WP:Math and it's infamous for this, both inside and out of the wikipedia community.
I've done my part in the past few years to link jargon to appropriate pages, fix circular definitions across pages by providing an entrance for someone trying to find an in, and created a few images (all of which to been replaced by better ones it seems). I totally get that it's one it's one of the best resources for the intelligentsia and I don't want to diminish that but that isn't the goal of an encyclopedia. I recently was shocked when I popped in an old copy Encarta and compared the text of our math articles. The articles are brief but you can actual pick up the topic if you not an expert. I feel a little overwhelmed though and hope someone hears and understands the community's pain. --ZacBowling ( user| talk) 11:05, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
FWIW, I have always in interpreted the "academic language" section to be referring to articles like apple that are commonly discussed in non-academic settings. It would be possible to fancy up that article with a lot of terms from biology, for example by saying "endocarp" instead of "core". But the common term for the core of an apple is "core".
The intended audience for apple is much broader than the intended audience for Galois cohomology, and it would be silly to expect the latter to be accessible in the same way that the former should be. The common, everyday word for "homological algebra" is "homological algebra"; there is no other, more common, term to use.
The "research papers" section, which claims that readers should not need to follow wikilinks, has been at odds with actual practice for years, and should generally just be ignored. This is not just in math; see B flat major for another article that you couldn't read unless you knew many terms. The lede of that article is also full of specialized terminology, and is also perfectly appropriate. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:27, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
This section's heading looks like someone didn't pay much attention before posting. "Just facts and proofs"? There aren't very many proofs in Wikipedia math articles. Proofs are something we have very little of here. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:57, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm a software engineer myself with a focus on user experience so that is where my brain goes. (coincidentally I used to work a TI developing the software for graphing calculators). Here are a couple of ideas:
It's sad that WP:Math is the only Wikipedia area that makes me feel like I should be using Simple English Wikipedia. --ZacBowling ( user| talk) 01:56, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
I have some relevant thoughts on the original post of this thread. The fact is that there are a great many mathematics articles that are inaccessible, and I don't think anyone can credibly deny this. There are plenty of terrible mathematics articles, some of which no doubt I myself have inflicted on the world. I do think that improving the accessibility of mathematics articles is an important and worthy goal, and I think the best we can hope for in general discussions here is a systematic solution, such as bringing the MOSMATH in line with our current best practices. But project members often display a lack of concern for these issues, or at least a lack of sensitivity to them, and various often sinister reasons have been ascribed for this. But I would like to make some candid observations that I think help explain why things are this way.
Wikipedia's mathematics editors seem to be mostly academics of one stripe or another, and this also seems to be less true of other content areas. To some extent, this dictates how our coverage of mathematics topics develops. I have written articles for the following reasons, and I think that so have many other mathematics editors if I had to guess at their motives based on their behavior: (1) to understand the topic of a seminar I am involved with, (2) as a convenient reference for myself (and other researchers), (3) as a resource for my students (who may be undergraduate or graduate students), (4) to help learn a subject myself or out of sheer curiosity of a subject that I know little about. While I'm sure that the whole altruistic "free encyclopedia" thing may make us feel good about our contributions, it's much too rarefied to elicit any real work on the encyclopedia (for me, at any rate). Out of my own motivations (and I presume those of others), very little has to do with making the encyclopedia accessible to Joe on the street. The only time accessibility is a big personal concern is when I am writing for students, but in their case I assume a fairly specific background (especially when they are graduate students) that the wider population isn't likely to have.
Wikipedia's mathematics editors themselves are also products of the wider world of mathematics, which seems to lack expository source material aimed at Joe on the street. For us, articles published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society are expository, although most of these articles are almost certainly not understandable to Joe. The rest of the sciences have serious expository outlets like Scientific American, the American Scientist, Nature, and Science, that attempt to explain cutting-edge developments in the sciences to laypeople. But mathematics has no such outlet: Journals in mathematics that specialize in exposition do not emphasize mathematics that is of substantial contemporary interest. One can attempt to rationalize this by saying that "It's the nature of the subject" and "It's much more difficult to make mathematics accessible than other content areas". Critics here dismiss these rationalizations as mere excuses, but I think it is significant that there are so few expository sources for most of mathematics. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:06, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
I clearly said that advanced mathematics generally lacks expository sources aimed at Joe on the street: that is, aimed at a completely non-mathematical audience. I wouldn't argue that there are expository sources aimed at mathematical audiences. The Princeton Mathematical Companion is pitched at about the same level as many of the "Notices" articles, and most of it is not accessible to Joe on the street. But I think this is a good example because it illustrates about the right level of expository style for several distinct groups of people in this discussion: those who wish to improve the accessibility of portions of our encyclopedia, those who feel that the compendious style of many of our articles is ok, and those that post here to complain that mathematics articles are inaccessible. There is obviously tension between these three groups, and getting them to agree on an acceptable style might be one way forward. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:42, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Also, what is the Japanese Encyclopedia? I'm familiar with Ito's Encyclopedic dictionary of mathematics, though I would emphatically disagree that the exposition in that text would be comfortable to non-mathematicians. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:45, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I have been working recently on List of mathematics journals. The list was pretty much unattended for a while, and recently some editors from the Academic Journals wikiproject asked us to clean it up. Journals aren't our core focus, but this list is certainly in the broad scope of the math project, as well as the scope of the journals project.
There is a notability "essay" WP:NJournals, which apparently has some weight at AFD discussions, which says that (as one possible criterion) if a journal has an impact factor and is indexed in Math Reviews and Zentralblatt MATH, then we can create an article on it. So I have pruned the redlinks on the list to journals that meet those criteria, and I am working on creating the articles. I made a journal article helper program that can help format the information about a journal into a reasonable stub. If you're interested, you can look up information on your favorite redlinked journal and make a stub article about it (this is easiest if you are at a computer with access to MathSciNet and Journal Citation Reports). — Carl ( CBM · talk) 15:17, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Another pair of cellular automata animations have been nominated, see WP:Featured picture candidates/Non-intermediate phases of BML Traffic Model. See are related to the CA animations that were promoted to FP a week or so ago.-- RDBury ( talk) 16:01, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
The article titled Flat function is somewhat orphaned, i.e. very few other articles link to it. This sort of function plays an important role in the theory of test functions, used in developing generalized functions. It also is used to show why complex differentiability is so much stronger than real differentiability. There must be other things that ought to link to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:06, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I declined a WP:PROD on this article but am sending it to AFD on request from the original PRODer. Some input from those familiar with computer science and mathmatics would be helpful. The discussion can be viewed here. -- Ron Ritzman ( talk) 01:40, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
The Dehn plane article is up for deletion. While plausible searching the usual suspects Planet Math, Encyclopaedia of Mathematics don't yield and references.-- Salix ( talk): 05:28, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
User:Tkuvho continues to accuse me of Bourbakism. He feels that the lead of Exterior algebra, because it mentions the universal construction, is "engaging in Bourbakism" (whatever that means). Could someone else please comment on what he means? Is he right and I just don't see it? Or is he just trying to provoke me? If so, it's working and it needs to stop. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:33, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Let's ask that everybody avoid personal attacks. It may be wise for some participants to take a few days off, for their own good and the project's. The participants have been very valuable members of WP and this project. Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( talk) 15:20, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I think I'd reserve the term "Bourbakism" for articles that start immediately with the most general possible approach to a topic that doesn't warrant it. On several occasions Bourbaki use monoids where most people would be happy with groups, or when they first develop integration they do it for arbitrary locally compact spaces (which I'm quite happy with, but would be the wrong place to start on wikipedia). I completely disagree with saying that mentioning category theory or functor in the lead of an article is "Bourbakist" and more importantly I disagree that it is wrong. Exterior algebra isn't the article "Prime number", it's an article about a formal algebraic tool. A tool which is commonly used in a functorial way. Almost nobody actually takes the exterior algebra of a vector space (at the very least, people use it for a module over a ring, or a representation of a group). If there is an article whose problem is unnecessary use of jargon, then it's problem is "unnecessary use of jargon", not "Bourbakism". For example, using "set" in the first sentence of the article "natural number" is an unnecessary use of jargon. An infringement that would more merit the term "Bourbakism" would be some sort of high-brow axiomatic description such as "In mathematics, the natural numbers are the standard model of Peano arithmetic." RobHar ( talk) 17:48, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Actually the knack is to take out excess "mathematics made difficult" formalism, while not being "anti-Hilbert" (retaining the idea that mathematical concepts are axiomatic and "sharp-edged", not vague). And being entirely accurate in what is said, unless flagged up with language such as "roughly speaking". Charles Matthews ( talk) 20:34, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
The above discussion gave me an idea — let us have a new bot which looks at the lead of an article and assigns it a number which is the smallest natural number greater than the numbers assigned to the articles to which it is linked. If it is not possible to calculate such a number due to a closed loop in the links, then it would report that fact and give a list of the links in the loop. This tool could be used to try to break circular definitions and reduce the depth of searching which readers have to do to understand the lead. JRSpriggs ( talk) 13:24, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
The article on affine Grassmanians AGr(n;k), i.e. the k-dimensional affine linear subspaces of an n-dimensional vector space need some additions. For example, it says that as a homogeneous space it can be realised as
At first it didn't even say what O(n−k) was, never mind link to the article. (It's the orthogonal group and E is the Euclidean group.) I think this expression needs explaining. I'm half way to understanding it, but not completely. You start with a k-dimensional subspace passing through the origin, say S0. You can move that onto any other k-dimensional affine subspace, say A0, by a Euclidean transformation; so we start with E(n). But different Euclidean transformations take S0 to A0; look at the image of the origin when you take S0 to A0. That's why we quotient out E(k); we get a map A0 → A0 given by different Euclidean transformations taking S0 to A0. This is where I start to get stuck. I can see that the O(n−k) term comes from the different choices of original subspace instead of S0. But that's just the ordinary Grassmannian Gr(n;k) and not O(n−k). Could some one possibly explain to me where O(n−k) and then add the explanation to the article itself? — Fly by Night ( talk) 16:27, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
There seems to be a big flaw in this article. The space of lines in P3 is a projective concept. Yet Plücker coordinates are defined in terms of a Euclidean structure defined on R3, e.g. the construction uses a scaler product. Cross products and scaler products depend upon the choice of Euclidean structure and are not projectively invariant. Is it just me, or does that seem a little alarming? — Fly by Night ( talk) 02:09, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
You should think of R3 is an affine coordinate patch of P3 (that is, it is just P3 minus the plane at infinity). Io describe lines in P3, it's enough to describe those in R3, and then add in the ones at infinity (e.g., take the projective closure).
That said, I'm not defending the approach taken by the article, though, which I find to be quite awkward. I think a better way to define the Plucker coordinates is to think of the space of lines in P3 as Gr(2,4). Planes through the origin in R4 are defined by simple two-forms in , which are uniquely defined up to scale, so there is a one-to-one correspondence of Gr(2,4) with the set of simple two-forms in (this is the Klein quadric). The coefficients of a 2-form in a basis then define the Plucker coordinates. The article should probably discuss this approach more explicitly. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:00, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
Input needed at Talk:Applied mathematics, where Michael P. Barnett ( talk · contribs) has proposed various re-writes of the lead paragraph of the article. My own view is that his writing style is poor, his proposed leads are rambling and do not summarise the article, and he makes several unsourced claims; in short he is proposing to replace the current brief and clear lead paragraph with a POV mini-essay. But that's just my opinion - views of other editors would be useful. Gandalf61 ( talk) 10:30, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
The situation regarding the articles titled ABC triangulation XYZ, for various values of ABC and XYZ, seems less than satisfactory. In particular:
How much difference is there between the topics of these articles? Should some be merged? How should they link among each other? Should we have a disambiguation page titled triangulation (mathematics) that would link to these and also to triangulated category and Delaunay triangulation and upper triangular matrix (apparently "triangulation" sometimes means putting a matrix into that form)? Michael Hardy ( talk) 22:25, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
"WikiProject Report" would like to focus on WikiProject Mathematics for an upcoming edition of The Signpost. This is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to your efforts and attract new members to the project. Would you be willing to participate in an interview? If so, you can find the interview questions here. Just add your response below each question and feel free to skip any questions that you don't feel comfortable answering. If you have any questions, you can leave a note on my talk page. Have a great day. – SMasters ( talk) 04:06, 7 February 2011 (UTC) |
Two animations related to maze generating algorithms have been nominated for FP. See Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Maze Generation 2.-- RDBury ( talk) 08:20, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
The brand-new article Groupoid algebra has been nominated for deletion. -- Lambiam 19:30, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
Greetings! This month, we have a large number of links to the disambiguation page, Adjoint representation - 61 links, to be exact. We at the Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links project would appreciate any help you could give us in fixing these ambiguous links. Cheers! bd2412 T 00:41, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
Project members might want to keep an eye on links that feed into gyrovector space. Someone has been trying to do quite a bit of WP:UNDUE promotion of this article, which perhaps includes some legitimate mathematics, but also appears to include some crackpot ideas. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:32, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
I have nominated logarithm for peer review. Please talk here. Thank you all, Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 21:41, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
The new article De Groot Fourier Transform has some very strange statements. E.g.,
I find myself doubting that "groot" is actually used as a parameter. The only reference in the article doesn't seem to talk about an analog of the Fourier transform at all.
I have the feeling that this is an elaborate hoax, but this is not a field that I'm familiar with. Can someone else take a look? Ozob ( talk) 02:55, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
WP has improved its math articles greatly since just 3 years ago, when reading an article on a topic one did not already know involved nested (and sometimes circular) link chasing for definitions (links that refer to articles with more links, and so on). I propose that editors try to put a WP:HAT on each article that does not define all its terms, with something like, "This article might be easier to read if you read article A first", in the case that terms come up that can best be understood by reading prerequisite article A, instead of the reader having to chase links for definitions. This might be something like a bottomless pit leading into philosophy of math, but it might also back link to an article the reader is already familiar with, breaking the "infinite" regression back. Remember what Hawking said about what the flat-earth-on-the-back-of-a-turtle-woman in the audience said to Bertrand Russell when he asked her upon what did the turtle upon which the earth rested rest, "its turtles all the way down" [2]. PPdd ( talk) 05:32, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
Another related proposal regards "suggested prerequisite for more easy comprehension", which is subtly different from a "more general treatment" hat. PPdd ( talk) 15:17, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
I keep having trouble with inkscape—could somebody please help me out with this image: ? I want the black rectangle be replaced by a z and the extraneous red phi removed. Thanks! Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 14:48, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
This has likely been covered before on talk, but I propose a general suggestion to add a "Definitions" section at the bottom, for terms defined in the article, for ease of reference. An opposition to this proposal might be that a user can do a search in the article, but this likely produces numerous results (the first of which should be the definition, if a definition has been made in the article. PPdd ( talk) 15:59, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
Very often the definition of the concept that the article is about is in the first sentence or otherwise near the beginning of the article. Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:26, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
There is a proposal to rename the category Recursion theory to Computability theory that hasn't received any response yet. Please comment there if you have any thoughts on the matter.-- RDBury ( talk) 08:19, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
Comments on Talk:Fundamental solution indicate a need to explain the relationship with Green's function. This is one of those interfaces between traditional language and contemporary mathematical language that has been discussed here. That would be part of the issue only, though. Charles Matthews ( talk) 12:24, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
Following the promotion of rhodocene to FA status, some discussion has started again at Wikipedia talk:Make technical articles understandable. That guideline is written in a way that does allow for some technical articles, although it was written to encourage all articles to be as accessible as possible. There have been some useful conversations here recently about accessibility, and people who contributed to those may be interested in following the discussion on the guideline page. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:00, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
Hey all. In looking through the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Make technical articles understandable mentioned by Carl in the previous section, in particular some comments of User:Sławomir Biały on the "target audience" of an article, I had a crazy idea: we could add a field to the Maths rating template banner we put on talk pages that holds the "target audience" of the article. It certainly seems like the target audience of an article is something that it is important to establish. Editors who have spent a long time on certain articles end up having to justify the work they've done to editors who have just shown up and are unhappy with the level of exposition. And that's fine, but it would help if the "seasoned" editors of the article had some way of pointing to an established consensus of what the "level" of the article is. I think there are several other ways this would help. The types of "levels" could be something like "Basic", "High school", "Undergraduate", "Advanced undergraduate", and "Graduate" (where the last should be used sparingly, and the specific terms used could be made more international or otherwise clarified). The approach of "one level down" that Carl has been talking about at Wikipedia talk:Make technical articles understandable would provide a guideline for how to assess the "target audience" of a given article. For some other articles, one would also want to use the subject's popularity to "lower" the level. Thoughts? RobHar ( talk) 14:46, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
The Mathematics WikiProject aims for this article to be accessible to a general readership. If this article is too technical for its intended audience, please feel free to edit it; see our advice for writing mathematics articles for tips. |
The Mathematics WikiProject aims for this article to be accessible to a reader whose has completed the beginnings of an undergraduate degree. If this article is too technical for its intended audience, please feel free to edit it; see our advice for writing mathematics articles for tips. |
If this article is too technical for its intended audience, please feel free to edit it; see our advice for writing mathematics articles for tips. |
I'd appreciate if people citing math papers in WP articles could make an effort to include non-paywall links to copies of the papers when such are available. The papers are often on the authors' personal websites or preprint sites like arxiv, and at other times can be found through citeseer or by googling the title, but sometimes they can be a bit obscure. I try to add such links when I come across them, but that's just a drop in the bucket. Thanks. 71.141.88.54 ( talk) 01:27, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
Also, if there's not a good non-walled copy of the paper but there is a JSTOR scan, we should include that, since lots of public libraries subscribe to JSTOR while usually only academic libraries will subscribe to Springerlink and the like. JSTOR improves accessibility over journal publisher sites in that regard. 71.141.88.54 ( talk) 06:53, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
{{
cite doi}}
. This thread has made me consider also adding a link to the end something like [
preprint], when such is available.
Qwfp (
talk)
10:29, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
{{
arxiv}}
". Note that this will link to the abstract page rather than directly to the pdf. This gives readers the choice what format they want. (usually both PS and PDF are available). Also note that only DOI links, will send you directly to the journal page, MR, JSTOR, PubMed, bibcode, etc. will provide a link to the article's entry in the respective database/repository.
T
R
11:30, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
Continuing the accessibility trend of late, there is a conversation visible on my talk page [6] about Poincaré conjecture. Since this is one of the Millennium Prize problems, it really should be as readable as possible up top. I made a minimal change to the lede to point out the fact, which is well known to confuse students, that the 3-sphere is the surface bounding the 4-dimensional unit ball (rather than, say, the 3-dimensional solid from grade school geometry). My change was reverted. Maybe someone else can find a better wording? — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:31, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
A couple of editors are attempting to rewrite the lede at Linear algebra. I reverted the first try here (as I didn't think it was an improvement) other edits have been made since. Other views welcome. (I'm traveling all day today and unable to give much attention to this.) Paul August ☎ 11:24, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
Am I the only person on Wikipedia who is actually monitoring Lists of integrals? The page is viewed 1900 times a day and supposedly has 49 watchers. Just today, substantial vandalism was left untouched for more than 13 hours. Xanthoxyl < 02:46, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
On my user page you'll see an easy way to tell how many people are watching. But I may not be watching all the pages that I'm watching. (Apologies to Yogi Berra.) Maybe Xanthoxyl is the only person monitoring that page. Being the only person watching a page has happened to me sometimes. Michael Hardy ( talk) 07:35, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi
As a result of my nominating a page (Dehn plane) for deletion. Consensus was that the name was incorrect as it could not be sourced and the deletion discussion is here Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Dehn_plane.
My move, based on the deletion discussion, was discussed here Talk:The_Dehn_plane#Bold_page_move
Several moves later it was left at Non-Legendrian geometry.
Now a single editor has gone against consensus and changed it back to a badly titled " The Dehn plane"
Firstly "The" should not be used, secondly consensus was against using Dehn plane and thirdly it seems as though some editors are deciding that their way is the right way even though it is against consensus.
I fully appreciate being bold, but something has to be done about this. There is no proof given so far that shows a convincing argument for using Dehn plane in any apart of the title. It has so far only produced one neologism from one source.
Chaosdruid ( talk) 21:24, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
At best the title of this new article is confusing since it's not about Curves in the mathematical sense. I thought flexible strips used in drafting were called splines, from which the mathematical term was derived; please confirm or correct me on this. It seems like we should have an article on them, whatever they're called. We also have a rudimentary article on Elastica theory which covers a mathematical model of these things.-- RDBury ( talk) 01:24, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
I recall something about "absurdity constants" (not absurdity "constraints") in relations to Suppes' Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Church's thesis, and Curry's paradox, but that is all I remember. Can anyone help with this for the absurdity article? PPdd ( talk) 05:39, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi
I have just added the maths project banner to Talk:Rake (angle)
I think it is within your scope but would appreciate someone checking that !
Thanks Chaosdruid ( talk) 02:26, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
Existential theory of the reals is an orphaned article: nothing links to it (except the list of mathematics articles). Some links to it could be created and it would bear expansion.
It's in three categories (maybe others should be added?): Category:Real algebraic geometry, Category:Mathematical logic, Category:Computational complexity theory. Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:54, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
Directing it to "elementary" rather than "existential" doesn't seem to make sense, since that's an essentially different problem. It's about sentences that begin only with existential quantifiers, and one can imagine statements like the one about NP-completeness changing if one allowed universal quantifiers. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:48, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
The article singular value decomposition is up for A-class review. It needs both reviewers and editors. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:14, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
The page Dehn plane contains a discussion of an example of a plane where the parallel postulate fails. The example satisfies Legendre's theorem to the effect that the sum of the angles in a triangle is π. The page has now been moved back to non-Legendrian geometry, even though the geometry discussed here is eminently Legendrian. This is the kind of committee decision we are getting famous for. Tkuvho ( talk) 12:42, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
The new article Sum of squares (disambiguation) includes a number of maths topics and hence might be worth checking. Melcombe ( talk) 17:27, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
I just needed a beautiful theorem which lots of people know but is not written down anywhere (asfaik) in an accessible way including elementary examples. Suppose a probability space is invariant under a compact group of transformations on . Suppose for simplicity that only the trivial subgroup leaves all elements of the space fixed (otherwise we must divide it out). Assume smoothness. Then the space is essentially the product of two independent probability spaces: one space carrying the maximal invariant, the other being the group itself with Haar measure. There is a neat elementary example in the Monty Hall problem.
The result is also much used in ergodic theory, it's called the ergodic decomposition.
Question: what to call it, what to link it to? I'd like to start writing the article but I'm a mathematical statistician, not an analyst or ergodic theorist or whatever.
There are connections to sufficiency, to invariance (in statistics), to experimental design, and so on. Everywhere where symmetry can be used to simplify statistical models or statistical reasoning. Multivariate normal distribution and multivariate analysis.
References:
R. Wijsman (1990), Invariant measure on groups and their use in statistics
P. Diaconis (1988), Group representations and their applications in statistics and probability
Richard Gill ( talk) 15:54, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
The above article is up for AfD here. I've had my say but there is some new discussion basically asking for more expert opinions, so please have your say if you can bring some mathematical expertise to the issue.-- RDBury ( talk) 21:49, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
R. Catesby Taliaferro is a stubby new article, doubtless imperfect. Do what you can. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:49, 27 February 2011 (UTC)
After constant editing conflicts for years, a discussion archive probably running several volumes as printed books and 2 failed mediations the article has ended up in arbitration now.
Maybe it is of interest for some of the editors here or they even want to provide an assessment/opinion.
Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Monty Hall problem
-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 22:06, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
Categorical bridge has been prodded. Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:33, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
Would someone please monitor. I'm at 3RR, and I can't say the edits I'm reverting are vandalism, just completely, and obviously, inappropriate. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 16:05, 27 February 2011 (UTC)
There is a discussion underway at Wt:MTAA that concerns this project. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 17:46, 28 February 2011 (UTC)
My suggestion is to adopt a guideline for math pages (particularly the more advanced ones) that they should include a specific pointer to the more elementary topics that need to be mastered in order to understand the more advanced page. The pointer should consist not merely in a mention of a page imbedded in a clause in a long sentence, but a specific mention that the linked page is more accessible. Here is an example. Riemannian manifolds and their curvature cannot even begin to be approached until the student has mastered the theorema egregium of Gauss and the idea that Gaussian curvature is an intrinsic invariant. Pages such as Riemannian manifold should make it clear that the reader has to understand surfaces first. A similar example: I believe the reason the contributor who expressed himself above cannot make any headway in exterior algebra is because the wedge product appears there in a completely "ex nihilo" fashion. By the time the article gets around to construct the exterior algebra in terms of the tensor algebra (!), we have already lost all beginners. The page exterior algebra is a great page, but it could be made more accessible to someone with basic background in linear algebra, but not much more. I tried to link it to more elementary pages in the spirit of my suggested guideline above, but encountered reverts on the grounds of being "unencyclopedic". We should adopt a guideline making it encyclopedic to try to help beginners. Tkuvho ( talk) 22:09, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
"The idea" is that a beginner who looks at, say, riemannian manifold, should not walk away baffled, intimidated, and non-plussed, having learned nothing. If we offer him some leads to lower-level articles, he will either look at those and learn something, or else say, OK, to understand Riemannian manifolds I need first to know what Gaussian curvature is. This is far less discouraging than walking away completely baffled, which seems to have been the experience of some of the beginners who expressed themselves above. Every college course has a list of prerequisites in the course catalog. I am not sure why some mild approximation in wiki should be viewed as such anathema. And I don't think this is "condescending" toward the beginner (see comment below), on the contrary, endless blather about "non-encyclopedic" is condescending. Tkuvho ( talk) 14:00, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
I think it is generally a bad idea to start of an article by saying: "you should know this, this, and that before attempting to read this." (Or any friendlier message with the same content.) It feels really condescending to me. Moreover, it encourages laziness on part of the editors, by just allowing them to put up some prerequisites and not push to obtain the uttermost accessibility that is possible for the subject. In particular, it encourages starting articles at a high entry level, instead of steadily increasing the difficulty level as the article proceeds. Another thing to keep in mind, is that there can exist vastly different roads to understanding a mathematical subject. A pattern I sometimes see in the thinking about accessibility of math pages on this project, is that it tends to focus on the path that a typical mathematics student would take in learning about the subject. This is not surprising since it is the path that many of contributors here followed/are following, but many users will actually have a different background, which often misses some of the mathematical foundations that a mathematics student would have, but might on the other hand might include a lot of hands experience of using similar structures. For example, students of theoretical physics will learn about Riemannian manifolds in a GR class without any solid knowledge Gaussian curvature or the theory of surfaces (that a mathematics student would have.) Similarly, when (even if) physics and engineering learn what a tensor of a vector bundle is, they usually have been working with examples of these structures for years. I think that a similar effect to providing a list of prerequisites, (without the possible condescending connotation) can be achieved by detailing in the lead what types of things a concept is generalizing and/or naming a few well-known (to people that do not already know about the subject) concrete examples. This typically are things that a reader should know about to understand the article. A reader that has never heard about any of these things, will generally get the clue that he has encountered an article for which he doesn't even properly understand the basic context. Although hopefully he will have a much better idea of the context then before. TimothyRias ( talk) 13:29, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
Here are some suggestions for the lead. I've itemized them for easier discussion.
-- Sławomir Biały ( talk) 23:40, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
1) Should this discussion be moved to another location? Maybe the talk page of WP:MOSMATH, since I think it is a good idea to record the result of this discussion somewhere, for example as a section of WP:MOSMATH. 2) I generally agree with the points above. Something that could be add is that, if use of jargon is unavoidable, it is generally a good idea to avoid using more than one new piece jargon in a sentence. This way it is possible for readers with a vague acquaintance of the subject, but who are fuzzy on the jargon to get some idea of the meaning of the jargon from the context. T R 08:59, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
Perturbation problem beyond all orders could use some work. Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:54, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
I know, I'm beating this horse over again going over the archives but there few issues and common themes that seem to repeat themselves. WP:NOTTEXTBOOK is often referenced (like in the FAQ above and essay reference) as the excuse for the difficulty of what it's hard to learn anything from WP:Math pages. I do not believe this fair that it's intended purpose. That was meant to leading questions followed by systematic problem solutions as examples. In that same section it states:
Also in right below that in that same section:
This is the problem with the current state of WP:Math and it's infamous for this, both inside and out of the wikipedia community.
I've done my part in the past few years to link jargon to appropriate pages, fix circular definitions across pages by providing an entrance for someone trying to find an in, and created a few images (all of which to been replaced by better ones it seems). I totally get that it's one it's one of the best resources for the intelligentsia and I don't want to diminish that but that isn't the goal of an encyclopedia. I recently was shocked when I popped in an old copy Encarta and compared the text of our math articles. The articles are brief but you can actual pick up the topic if you not an expert. I feel a little overwhelmed though and hope someone hears and understands the community's pain. --ZacBowling ( user| talk) 11:05, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
FWIW, I have always in interpreted the "academic language" section to be referring to articles like apple that are commonly discussed in non-academic settings. It would be possible to fancy up that article with a lot of terms from biology, for example by saying "endocarp" instead of "core". But the common term for the core of an apple is "core".
The intended audience for apple is much broader than the intended audience for Galois cohomology, and it would be silly to expect the latter to be accessible in the same way that the former should be. The common, everyday word for "homological algebra" is "homological algebra"; there is no other, more common, term to use.
The "research papers" section, which claims that readers should not need to follow wikilinks, has been at odds with actual practice for years, and should generally just be ignored. This is not just in math; see B flat major for another article that you couldn't read unless you knew many terms. The lede of that article is also full of specialized terminology, and is also perfectly appropriate. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:27, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
This section's heading looks like someone didn't pay much attention before posting. "Just facts and proofs"? There aren't very many proofs in Wikipedia math articles. Proofs are something we have very little of here. Michael Hardy ( talk) 17:57, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm a software engineer myself with a focus on user experience so that is where my brain goes. (coincidentally I used to work a TI developing the software for graphing calculators). Here are a couple of ideas:
It's sad that WP:Math is the only Wikipedia area that makes me feel like I should be using Simple English Wikipedia. --ZacBowling ( user| talk) 01:56, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
I have some relevant thoughts on the original post of this thread. The fact is that there are a great many mathematics articles that are inaccessible, and I don't think anyone can credibly deny this. There are plenty of terrible mathematics articles, some of which no doubt I myself have inflicted on the world. I do think that improving the accessibility of mathematics articles is an important and worthy goal, and I think the best we can hope for in general discussions here is a systematic solution, such as bringing the MOSMATH in line with our current best practices. But project members often display a lack of concern for these issues, or at least a lack of sensitivity to them, and various often sinister reasons have been ascribed for this. But I would like to make some candid observations that I think help explain why things are this way.
Wikipedia's mathematics editors seem to be mostly academics of one stripe or another, and this also seems to be less true of other content areas. To some extent, this dictates how our coverage of mathematics topics develops. I have written articles for the following reasons, and I think that so have many other mathematics editors if I had to guess at their motives based on their behavior: (1) to understand the topic of a seminar I am involved with, (2) as a convenient reference for myself (and other researchers), (3) as a resource for my students (who may be undergraduate or graduate students), (4) to help learn a subject myself or out of sheer curiosity of a subject that I know little about. While I'm sure that the whole altruistic "free encyclopedia" thing may make us feel good about our contributions, it's much too rarefied to elicit any real work on the encyclopedia (for me, at any rate). Out of my own motivations (and I presume those of others), very little has to do with making the encyclopedia accessible to Joe on the street. The only time accessibility is a big personal concern is when I am writing for students, but in their case I assume a fairly specific background (especially when they are graduate students) that the wider population isn't likely to have.
Wikipedia's mathematics editors themselves are also products of the wider world of mathematics, which seems to lack expository source material aimed at Joe on the street. For us, articles published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society are expository, although most of these articles are almost certainly not understandable to Joe. The rest of the sciences have serious expository outlets like Scientific American, the American Scientist, Nature, and Science, that attempt to explain cutting-edge developments in the sciences to laypeople. But mathematics has no such outlet: Journals in mathematics that specialize in exposition do not emphasize mathematics that is of substantial contemporary interest. One can attempt to rationalize this by saying that "It's the nature of the subject" and "It's much more difficult to make mathematics accessible than other content areas". Critics here dismiss these rationalizations as mere excuses, but I think it is significant that there are so few expository sources for most of mathematics. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:06, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
I clearly said that advanced mathematics generally lacks expository sources aimed at Joe on the street: that is, aimed at a completely non-mathematical audience. I wouldn't argue that there are expository sources aimed at mathematical audiences. The Princeton Mathematical Companion is pitched at about the same level as many of the "Notices" articles, and most of it is not accessible to Joe on the street. But I think this is a good example because it illustrates about the right level of expository style for several distinct groups of people in this discussion: those who wish to improve the accessibility of portions of our encyclopedia, those who feel that the compendious style of many of our articles is ok, and those that post here to complain that mathematics articles are inaccessible. There is obviously tension between these three groups, and getting them to agree on an acceptable style might be one way forward. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:42, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Also, what is the Japanese Encyclopedia? I'm familiar with Ito's Encyclopedic dictionary of mathematics, though I would emphatically disagree that the exposition in that text would be comfortable to non-mathematicians. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:45, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I have been working recently on List of mathematics journals. The list was pretty much unattended for a while, and recently some editors from the Academic Journals wikiproject asked us to clean it up. Journals aren't our core focus, but this list is certainly in the broad scope of the math project, as well as the scope of the journals project.
There is a notability "essay" WP:NJournals, which apparently has some weight at AFD discussions, which says that (as one possible criterion) if a journal has an impact factor and is indexed in Math Reviews and Zentralblatt MATH, then we can create an article on it. So I have pruned the redlinks on the list to journals that meet those criteria, and I am working on creating the articles. I made a journal article helper program that can help format the information about a journal into a reasonable stub. If you're interested, you can look up information on your favorite redlinked journal and make a stub article about it (this is easiest if you are at a computer with access to MathSciNet and Journal Citation Reports). — Carl ( CBM · talk) 15:17, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Another pair of cellular automata animations have been nominated, see WP:Featured picture candidates/Non-intermediate phases of BML Traffic Model. See are related to the CA animations that were promoted to FP a week or so ago.-- RDBury ( talk) 16:01, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
The article titled Flat function is somewhat orphaned, i.e. very few other articles link to it. This sort of function plays an important role in the theory of test functions, used in developing generalized functions. It also is used to show why complex differentiability is so much stronger than real differentiability. There must be other things that ought to link to it. Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:06, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I declined a WP:PROD on this article but am sending it to AFD on request from the original PRODer. Some input from those familiar with computer science and mathmatics would be helpful. The discussion can be viewed here. -- Ron Ritzman ( talk) 01:40, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
The Dehn plane article is up for deletion. While plausible searching the usual suspects Planet Math, Encyclopaedia of Mathematics don't yield and references.-- Salix ( talk): 05:28, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
User:Tkuvho continues to accuse me of Bourbakism. He feels that the lead of Exterior algebra, because it mentions the universal construction, is "engaging in Bourbakism" (whatever that means). Could someone else please comment on what he means? Is he right and I just don't see it? Or is he just trying to provoke me? If so, it's working and it needs to stop. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 12:33, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Let's ask that everybody avoid personal attacks. It may be wise for some participants to take a few days off, for their own good and the project's. The participants have been very valuable members of WP and this project. Kiefer.Wolfowitz ( talk) 15:20, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I think I'd reserve the term "Bourbakism" for articles that start immediately with the most general possible approach to a topic that doesn't warrant it. On several occasions Bourbaki use monoids where most people would be happy with groups, or when they first develop integration they do it for arbitrary locally compact spaces (which I'm quite happy with, but would be the wrong place to start on wikipedia). I completely disagree with saying that mentioning category theory or functor in the lead of an article is "Bourbakist" and more importantly I disagree that it is wrong. Exterior algebra isn't the article "Prime number", it's an article about a formal algebraic tool. A tool which is commonly used in a functorial way. Almost nobody actually takes the exterior algebra of a vector space (at the very least, people use it for a module over a ring, or a representation of a group). If there is an article whose problem is unnecessary use of jargon, then it's problem is "unnecessary use of jargon", not "Bourbakism". For example, using "set" in the first sentence of the article "natural number" is an unnecessary use of jargon. An infringement that would more merit the term "Bourbakism" would be some sort of high-brow axiomatic description such as "In mathematics, the natural numbers are the standard model of Peano arithmetic." RobHar ( talk) 17:48, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Actually the knack is to take out excess "mathematics made difficult" formalism, while not being "anti-Hilbert" (retaining the idea that mathematical concepts are axiomatic and "sharp-edged", not vague). And being entirely accurate in what is said, unless flagged up with language such as "roughly speaking". Charles Matthews ( talk) 20:34, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
The above discussion gave me an idea — let us have a new bot which looks at the lead of an article and assigns it a number which is the smallest natural number greater than the numbers assigned to the articles to which it is linked. If it is not possible to calculate such a number due to a closed loop in the links, then it would report that fact and give a list of the links in the loop. This tool could be used to try to break circular definitions and reduce the depth of searching which readers have to do to understand the lead. JRSpriggs ( talk) 13:24, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
The article on affine Grassmanians AGr(n;k), i.e. the k-dimensional affine linear subspaces of an n-dimensional vector space need some additions. For example, it says that as a homogeneous space it can be realised as
At first it didn't even say what O(n−k) was, never mind link to the article. (It's the orthogonal group and E is the Euclidean group.) I think this expression needs explaining. I'm half way to understanding it, but not completely. You start with a k-dimensional subspace passing through the origin, say S0. You can move that onto any other k-dimensional affine subspace, say A0, by a Euclidean transformation; so we start with E(n). But different Euclidean transformations take S0 to A0; look at the image of the origin when you take S0 to A0. That's why we quotient out E(k); we get a map A0 → A0 given by different Euclidean transformations taking S0 to A0. This is where I start to get stuck. I can see that the O(n−k) term comes from the different choices of original subspace instead of S0. But that's just the ordinary Grassmannian Gr(n;k) and not O(n−k). Could some one possibly explain to me where O(n−k) and then add the explanation to the article itself? — Fly by Night ( talk) 16:27, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
There seems to be a big flaw in this article. The space of lines in P3 is a projective concept. Yet Plücker coordinates are defined in terms of a Euclidean structure defined on R3, e.g. the construction uses a scaler product. Cross products and scaler products depend upon the choice of Euclidean structure and are not projectively invariant. Is it just me, or does that seem a little alarming? — Fly by Night ( talk) 02:09, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
You should think of R3 is an affine coordinate patch of P3 (that is, it is just P3 minus the plane at infinity). Io describe lines in P3, it's enough to describe those in R3, and then add in the ones at infinity (e.g., take the projective closure).
That said, I'm not defending the approach taken by the article, though, which I find to be quite awkward. I think a better way to define the Plucker coordinates is to think of the space of lines in P3 as Gr(2,4). Planes through the origin in R4 are defined by simple two-forms in , which are uniquely defined up to scale, so there is a one-to-one correspondence of Gr(2,4) with the set of simple two-forms in (this is the Klein quadric). The coefficients of a 2-form in a basis then define the Plucker coordinates. The article should probably discuss this approach more explicitly. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:00, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
Input needed at Talk:Applied mathematics, where Michael P. Barnett ( talk · contribs) has proposed various re-writes of the lead paragraph of the article. My own view is that his writing style is poor, his proposed leads are rambling and do not summarise the article, and he makes several unsourced claims; in short he is proposing to replace the current brief and clear lead paragraph with a POV mini-essay. But that's just my opinion - views of other editors would be useful. Gandalf61 ( talk) 10:30, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
The situation regarding the articles titled ABC triangulation XYZ, for various values of ABC and XYZ, seems less than satisfactory. In particular:
How much difference is there between the topics of these articles? Should some be merged? How should they link among each other? Should we have a disambiguation page titled triangulation (mathematics) that would link to these and also to triangulated category and Delaunay triangulation and upper triangular matrix (apparently "triangulation" sometimes means putting a matrix into that form)? Michael Hardy ( talk) 22:25, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
"WikiProject Report" would like to focus on WikiProject Mathematics for an upcoming edition of The Signpost. This is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to your efforts and attract new members to the project. Would you be willing to participate in an interview? If so, you can find the interview questions here. Just add your response below each question and feel free to skip any questions that you don't feel comfortable answering. If you have any questions, you can leave a note on my talk page. Have a great day. – SMasters ( talk) 04:06, 7 February 2011 (UTC) |
Two animations related to maze generating algorithms have been nominated for FP. See Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Maze Generation 2.-- RDBury ( talk) 08:20, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
The brand-new article Groupoid algebra has been nominated for deletion. -- Lambiam 19:30, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
Greetings! This month, we have a large number of links to the disambiguation page, Adjoint representation - 61 links, to be exact. We at the Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links project would appreciate any help you could give us in fixing these ambiguous links. Cheers! bd2412 T 00:41, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
Project members might want to keep an eye on links that feed into gyrovector space. Someone has been trying to do quite a bit of WP:UNDUE promotion of this article, which perhaps includes some legitimate mathematics, but also appears to include some crackpot ideas. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 13:32, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
I have nominated logarithm for peer review. Please talk here. Thank you all, Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 21:41, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
The new article De Groot Fourier Transform has some very strange statements. E.g.,
I find myself doubting that "groot" is actually used as a parameter. The only reference in the article doesn't seem to talk about an analog of the Fourier transform at all.
I have the feeling that this is an elaborate hoax, but this is not a field that I'm familiar with. Can someone else take a look? Ozob ( talk) 02:55, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
WP has improved its math articles greatly since just 3 years ago, when reading an article on a topic one did not already know involved nested (and sometimes circular) link chasing for definitions (links that refer to articles with more links, and so on). I propose that editors try to put a WP:HAT on each article that does not define all its terms, with something like, "This article might be easier to read if you read article A first", in the case that terms come up that can best be understood by reading prerequisite article A, instead of the reader having to chase links for definitions. This might be something like a bottomless pit leading into philosophy of math, but it might also back link to an article the reader is already familiar with, breaking the "infinite" regression back. Remember what Hawking said about what the flat-earth-on-the-back-of-a-turtle-woman in the audience said to Bertrand Russell when he asked her upon what did the turtle upon which the earth rested rest, "its turtles all the way down" [2]. PPdd ( talk) 05:32, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
Another related proposal regards "suggested prerequisite for more easy comprehension", which is subtly different from a "more general treatment" hat. PPdd ( talk) 15:17, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
I keep having trouble with inkscape—could somebody please help me out with this image: ? I want the black rectangle be replaced by a z and the extraneous red phi removed. Thanks! Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 14:48, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
This has likely been covered before on talk, but I propose a general suggestion to add a "Definitions" section at the bottom, for terms defined in the article, for ease of reference. An opposition to this proposal might be that a user can do a search in the article, but this likely produces numerous results (the first of which should be the definition, if a definition has been made in the article. PPdd ( talk) 15:59, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
Very often the definition of the concept that the article is about is in the first sentence or otherwise near the beginning of the article. Michael Hardy ( talk) 18:26, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
There is a proposal to rename the category Recursion theory to Computability theory that hasn't received any response yet. Please comment there if you have any thoughts on the matter.-- RDBury ( talk) 08:19, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
Comments on Talk:Fundamental solution indicate a need to explain the relationship with Green's function. This is one of those interfaces between traditional language and contemporary mathematical language that has been discussed here. That would be part of the issue only, though. Charles Matthews ( talk) 12:24, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
Following the promotion of rhodocene to FA status, some discussion has started again at Wikipedia talk:Make technical articles understandable. That guideline is written in a way that does allow for some technical articles, although it was written to encourage all articles to be as accessible as possible. There have been some useful conversations here recently about accessibility, and people who contributed to those may be interested in following the discussion on the guideline page. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:00, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
Hey all. In looking through the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Make technical articles understandable mentioned by Carl in the previous section, in particular some comments of User:Sławomir Biały on the "target audience" of an article, I had a crazy idea: we could add a field to the Maths rating template banner we put on talk pages that holds the "target audience" of the article. It certainly seems like the target audience of an article is something that it is important to establish. Editors who have spent a long time on certain articles end up having to justify the work they've done to editors who have just shown up and are unhappy with the level of exposition. And that's fine, but it would help if the "seasoned" editors of the article had some way of pointing to an established consensus of what the "level" of the article is. I think there are several other ways this would help. The types of "levels" could be something like "Basic", "High school", "Undergraduate", "Advanced undergraduate", and "Graduate" (where the last should be used sparingly, and the specific terms used could be made more international or otherwise clarified). The approach of "one level down" that Carl has been talking about at Wikipedia talk:Make technical articles understandable would provide a guideline for how to assess the "target audience" of a given article. For some other articles, one would also want to use the subject's popularity to "lower" the level. Thoughts? RobHar ( talk) 14:46, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
The Mathematics WikiProject aims for this article to be accessible to a general readership. If this article is too technical for its intended audience, please feel free to edit it; see our advice for writing mathematics articles for tips. |
The Mathematics WikiProject aims for this article to be accessible to a reader whose has completed the beginnings of an undergraduate degree. If this article is too technical for its intended audience, please feel free to edit it; see our advice for writing mathematics articles for tips. |
If this article is too technical for its intended audience, please feel free to edit it; see our advice for writing mathematics articles for tips. |
I'd appreciate if people citing math papers in WP articles could make an effort to include non-paywall links to copies of the papers when such are available. The papers are often on the authors' personal websites or preprint sites like arxiv, and at other times can be found through citeseer or by googling the title, but sometimes they can be a bit obscure. I try to add such links when I come across them, but that's just a drop in the bucket. Thanks. 71.141.88.54 ( talk) 01:27, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
Also, if there's not a good non-walled copy of the paper but there is a JSTOR scan, we should include that, since lots of public libraries subscribe to JSTOR while usually only academic libraries will subscribe to Springerlink and the like. JSTOR improves accessibility over journal publisher sites in that regard. 71.141.88.54 ( talk) 06:53, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
{{
cite doi}}
. This thread has made me consider also adding a link to the end something like [
preprint], when such is available.
Qwfp (
talk)
10:29, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
{{
arxiv}}
". Note that this will link to the abstract page rather than directly to the pdf. This gives readers the choice what format they want. (usually both PS and PDF are available). Also note that only DOI links, will send you directly to the journal page, MR, JSTOR, PubMed, bibcode, etc. will provide a link to the article's entry in the respective database/repository.
T
R
11:30, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
Continuing the accessibility trend of late, there is a conversation visible on my talk page [6] about Poincaré conjecture. Since this is one of the Millennium Prize problems, it really should be as readable as possible up top. I made a minimal change to the lede to point out the fact, which is well known to confuse students, that the 3-sphere is the surface bounding the 4-dimensional unit ball (rather than, say, the 3-dimensional solid from grade school geometry). My change was reverted. Maybe someone else can find a better wording? — Carl ( CBM · talk) 12:31, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
A couple of editors are attempting to rewrite the lede at Linear algebra. I reverted the first try here (as I didn't think it was an improvement) other edits have been made since. Other views welcome. (I'm traveling all day today and unable to give much attention to this.) Paul August ☎ 11:24, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
Am I the only person on Wikipedia who is actually monitoring Lists of integrals? The page is viewed 1900 times a day and supposedly has 49 watchers. Just today, substantial vandalism was left untouched for more than 13 hours. Xanthoxyl < 02:46, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
On my user page you'll see an easy way to tell how many people are watching. But I may not be watching all the pages that I'm watching. (Apologies to Yogi Berra.) Maybe Xanthoxyl is the only person monitoring that page. Being the only person watching a page has happened to me sometimes. Michael Hardy ( talk) 07:35, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi
As a result of my nominating a page (Dehn plane) for deletion. Consensus was that the name was incorrect as it could not be sourced and the deletion discussion is here Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Dehn_plane.
My move, based on the deletion discussion, was discussed here Talk:The_Dehn_plane#Bold_page_move
Several moves later it was left at Non-Legendrian geometry.
Now a single editor has gone against consensus and changed it back to a badly titled " The Dehn plane"
Firstly "The" should not be used, secondly consensus was against using Dehn plane and thirdly it seems as though some editors are deciding that their way is the right way even though it is against consensus.
I fully appreciate being bold, but something has to be done about this. There is no proof given so far that shows a convincing argument for using Dehn plane in any apart of the title. It has so far only produced one neologism from one source.
Chaosdruid ( talk) 21:24, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
At best the title of this new article is confusing since it's not about Curves in the mathematical sense. I thought flexible strips used in drafting were called splines, from which the mathematical term was derived; please confirm or correct me on this. It seems like we should have an article on them, whatever they're called. We also have a rudimentary article on Elastica theory which covers a mathematical model of these things.-- RDBury ( talk) 01:24, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
I recall something about "absurdity constants" (not absurdity "constraints") in relations to Suppes' Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Church's thesis, and Curry's paradox, but that is all I remember. Can anyone help with this for the absurdity article? PPdd ( talk) 05:39, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi
I have just added the maths project banner to Talk:Rake (angle)
I think it is within your scope but would appreciate someone checking that !
Thanks Chaosdruid ( talk) 02:26, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
Existential theory of the reals is an orphaned article: nothing links to it (except the list of mathematics articles). Some links to it could be created and it would bear expansion.
It's in three categories (maybe others should be added?): Category:Real algebraic geometry, Category:Mathematical logic, Category:Computational complexity theory. Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:54, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
Directing it to "elementary" rather than "existential" doesn't seem to make sense, since that's an essentially different problem. It's about sentences that begin only with existential quantifiers, and one can imagine statements like the one about NP-completeness changing if one allowed universal quantifiers. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:48, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
The article singular value decomposition is up for A-class review. It needs both reviewers and editors. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 14:14, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
The page Dehn plane contains a discussion of an example of a plane where the parallel postulate fails. The example satisfies Legendre's theorem to the effect that the sum of the angles in a triangle is π. The page has now been moved back to non-Legendrian geometry, even though the geometry discussed here is eminently Legendrian. This is the kind of committee decision we are getting famous for. Tkuvho ( talk) 12:42, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
The new article Sum of squares (disambiguation) includes a number of maths topics and hence might be worth checking. Melcombe ( talk) 17:27, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
I just needed a beautiful theorem which lots of people know but is not written down anywhere (asfaik) in an accessible way including elementary examples. Suppose a probability space is invariant under a compact group of transformations on . Suppose for simplicity that only the trivial subgroup leaves all elements of the space fixed (otherwise we must divide it out). Assume smoothness. Then the space is essentially the product of two independent probability spaces: one space carrying the maximal invariant, the other being the group itself with Haar measure. There is a neat elementary example in the Monty Hall problem.
The result is also much used in ergodic theory, it's called the ergodic decomposition.
Question: what to call it, what to link it to? I'd like to start writing the article but I'm a mathematical statistician, not an analyst or ergodic theorist or whatever.
There are connections to sufficiency, to invariance (in statistics), to experimental design, and so on. Everywhere where symmetry can be used to simplify statistical models or statistical reasoning. Multivariate normal distribution and multivariate analysis.
References:
R. Wijsman (1990), Invariant measure on groups and their use in statistics
P. Diaconis (1988), Group representations and their applications in statistics and probability
Richard Gill ( talk) 15:54, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
The above article is up for AfD here. I've had my say but there is some new discussion basically asking for more expert opinions, so please have your say if you can bring some mathematical expertise to the issue.-- RDBury ( talk) 21:49, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
R. Catesby Taliaferro is a stubby new article, doubtless imperfect. Do what you can. Michael Hardy ( talk) 00:49, 27 February 2011 (UTC)
After constant editing conflicts for years, a discussion archive probably running several volumes as printed books and 2 failed mediations the article has ended up in arbitration now.
Maybe it is of interest for some of the editors here or they even want to provide an assessment/opinion.
Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Monty Hall problem
-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 22:06, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
Categorical bridge has been prodded. Michael Hardy ( talk) 04:33, 21 February 2011 (UTC)
Would someone please monitor. I'm at 3RR, and I can't say the edits I'm reverting are vandalism, just completely, and obviously, inappropriate. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 16:05, 27 February 2011 (UTC)
There is a discussion underway at Wt:MTAA that concerns this project. Sławomir Biały ( talk) 17:46, 28 February 2011 (UTC)